September 2017 will be the 20th anniversary of the release of the Verve's album Urban Hymns, which features songs such as Bitter Sweet Symphony and Lucky Man and remains in the top 20 best-selling albums of all time in the UK. To mark the occasion, the British photographer and Filmmaker Chris Floyd, who shot the British rock band as they rose to fame, will release the memoir The Verve: Photographs by Chris Floyd in September, on Reel Art Press. The majority of Floyd's black and white and colour snapshots of the band touring, recording and promoting Urban Hymns from 1996-97 have never been seen. “Those years, it turns out, were the twilight of analogue consciousness and certain seeming certainties about the world at large,” Michael Holden, a journalist who went on tour with the Verve in the US, writes in the book’s introduction. “Whatever we are now, we were not then. This isn’t just the everyday past we’re looking at, but another planet.” Talk about bittersweet.
On 21 September, the National Portrait Gallery in London is due to host a book signing and Q & A session with Floyd, the journalist Miranda Sawyer and the writer and critic Richard Benson.
